| THE AYALA WAY

Vol 6 No 36

Through Globe's Kickstart Ventures, the ACTIVE Fund has invested in Featherless.ai to help democratize access to AI.

IMAGINE IT BETTER · CREATE VALUE TOGETHER

ACTIVE Fund Invests in Featherless.ai

Kickstart Ventures, the wholly owned corporate venture capital firm of Globe Telecom, announced that the Ayala Corporation Technology Innovation Venture (ACTIVE) Fund has invested in Featherless.ai as part of the latter's US$5 million seed funding round in March. Other investors included venture capital firms Airbus Ventures, 500 Global, HF0, Panache Ventures, and Oakseed Ventures.

Featherless.ai is a US-based company that provides a serverless artificial intelligence (AI) inference platform which makes it easier to access a wide range of AI programs without much technical expertise or investment in expensive equipment such as powerful graphics processing units. This means that even casual AI users and small businesses can use AI more seamlessly, dynamically, and affordably.

“We believe in [Featherless.AI’s] mission of democratizing access to AI [by] making it cheaper for both enterprises and individuals to run the latest open-source models through technology that optimizes GPU utilization costs and lowering inference costs," said Kickstart Ventures General Parter Joan Yao.

Founder and CEO Eugene Cheah shared his vision of a future where AI is not controlled by the few: “Featherless.ai is changing the game by providing an affordable and scalable solution for using open source AI models in production.”

The platform provides instant access to about 4,000 AI models, primarily on the HuggingFace ecosystem, at a low entry point of $10 (P573) per month for personal users and a flat capacity pricing model for businesses and enterprises. With the latest funding, Featherless.ai plans to support all major AI modalities including embeddings, vision, and speech. It hopes to advance research and development into next-generation AI architectures that decrease inference costs to make AI deployment feasible on lower cost hardware.

Managed by Kickstart Ventures, the ACTIVE Fund is the largest venture capital fund to come out of the Philippines. It is a concrete expression of the Ayala group’s commitment to new sectors, emerging trends, and innovative businesses.

Learn more at Featherless.ai and Kickstart.ph/investment-focus.